5 Key Characteristics of the Digital Workforce

There’s a lot of talk about digital HR and the digital workforce. In this article, I will answer the question what the digital workforce is and how you can apply this knowledge to make better personnel decisions. To do this I use the five key characteristics that any digital workforce needs to have.

What is the digital workforce?

The short answer is: no one knows. It is, however, very important! The picture below shows the percentage of respondents rating this digital HR trend “important” or “very important”.

Source: Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, 2017

Of course, the digital workforce is not the same as digital HR – but it has a lot to do with it!

To learn what the digital workforce is, we can best look at the organizations that already leverage this. These are the high growth firms like Google and Facebook were a few years ago. These kinds of organizations can scale up their workforce very rapidly by leveraging all the digital capabilities available.

If we can learn from these high-growth organizations we can start to apply it to our own organization. In my talk below I use the book Exponential Organizations to explain how these organizations make better workforce decisions and leverage all the digital capabilities available.

In the video below, I explain what the digital workforce is, how it will change the way we work and how it can be used to make the organization more effective.

As you saw in the video, the digital workforce consists of five key components, which can be remembered by the SCALE acronym.

Staff on demand

Communities which are maintained and leveraged

Algorithms that enable the workforce to operate more efficiently

Leveraging off technology to fully automate work

Engaging the workforce that remains

This is how the digital workforce enables you to stay on top of your game through efficient work, flexible staff, and automation. Leveraging this helps to save time, cut costs and focus your organization on the aspects of the workforce that add the most value.

A different aspect of the digital workforce is learning. Check out our article on real-time learning and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay on top of the latest developments!